Tag Archives: patching

We all know about “Patch Tuesday”, Microsoft release date for patches to it’s operating system, .net and other software. We all have plans around this activity and many of us have processes set up to facilitate these updates. Well, ok, most of us do.

However your ICT estate does not comprise of MS alone. You will have other kit that has software running it. You might even have linux servers as well as switches and routers available from a variety of vendors.

Do you know if these are up to date?

I recall a conversation regarding patching with a group of data centre techies and managers. We addressed the MS side quite easily and with little headache for the most part. However, after an audit, it was apparent that the linux servers had not been patched in years, and by years I mean more than six or seven. Mainly because it was felt that they didn’t need patching when they were rolled out, linux being considered more secure.

However patching is not only about killing exploits. It is also about increasing the efficiency of the software as well as hardware. So these servers were running flavours of linux that were very much out of date, that in some cases had vulnerabilities. All were impacted in terms of running the latest revision of firmware, drivers, and OS.

Then we have the other parts of the estate – switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, storage devices. Certainly all these can be compromised and result in embarrassing the IT department. As IT professionals we certainly don’t want that, right?

So how do you weigh the risks? There are costs involved, obviously, as well as possible impact on production. I recall one organisation running a update on their back up software that resulted in a pretty major catastrophe by taking the storage array off line.

Keeping up to date with your vendor’s updates is vital as is understanding what the update will do both during the up date and after. Will it break applications for example (with storage), will the device reboot and leave your network unprotected (firewall)? Hopefully the answer is no. However if there is one thing that you should do, if at all possible is test the updates first before releasing. Unless it is a hugely critical security update (and even then I seriously suggest testing before release, and have a back up plan to hand when it goes wrong) you can take time to do this.

If you have to wait for a suitable window in which to do an update then that is ideal to also do testing. Testing tells you if the update is stable, it gives you an opportunity to learn about any changes and certainly should tell you if you can expect any major issues.

Sure patching is a pain and no one really likes to do it because the pain it can cause but as indicated above there are steps that do help reduce or limit that pain. However you need to weigh up the pro’s and con’s as a business.